It all started so well. The crowds were out in force, the lighting, set up, bar service was all up to scratch. On entering the grassy patch next to Barsati where the Fatboy Slim gig was taking place, it was hard to not be impressed. With the marina buildings and misty full moon hovering over us, the mood was set for a night of credit crunch beating magic. The local warm up DJs did their job and got the crowd warmed up. All set.

Then something happened. 10 minutes in to Fatboy Slims set, the spell was broken. What started with what appeared to be a minor technical hitch soon decended in to a farce. The entire 1.5 hour set was spent with Mr Norman Cook either shouting at some sound engineer off stage, demanding things like to have a panel erected to block the light or occasionally flailing his arms like a demented old fool. The illusion was gone. He didn’t even mix, preferring to just play track after track and then fiddle with a knob in a particularly dramatic way. Suddenly Fatboy slim wasn’t a hip cutting edge DJ, but a slightly ridiculous aging bloke from Brighton stuck on stage doing something that he didnt feel entirely comfortable doing.

You could see it on everybody’s faces. We were all thinking the same….If my dad ever started up DJing, this is what it would look like.

Over the past few days, I have for one reason or another come across Alexander Mcnabb. He certainly gets around as I’ve heard hi on the radio, seen him talking Dubai on a Piers Morgan UK TV show, come across his blog and today saw his comments in some random media mag. Alexander seems quite keen to stress one point very firmly, and that is that bloggers are not journalists and should be refered to, as what he calls ”customers”.

I disagree. For blogging to survive as a genre (and there is alot of talk about its death) it has to start to live up to journalistic principles. For me one of the pitfalls of the internet age is that every Tom, Dick and Harry feels that, now they are given the ability to create their own blog, they should be able to get away with writing content that is often boring and uniformitive that does nothing to forward the readers view about the world around them. For me it doesn’t matter where you’re reading it from, be it a magazine, a newspaper, book OR blog the content should of at least aim to be of a high quality with the principles of a balanced argument in place.

The blogoshere is filled with alot of hot air and its hard to deny that its not. Readers have to sift through endless mindless expressions about things that no one really cares about because the writer hasnt taken the time or effort to consider what they are writing. One day in the not so distant future, all writing will be internet based and the boundaries between a journalist and a blogger will have all but disappeared. Once that happens, it will only be the quality, researched and subststantiated points of view and articles that will get noticed.

In the land of sand we may be feeling the tremors of change that are beginning to reverberate around the world after Barack Obama’s inaugaration, but what will soon be apparent is that the shift in the pysche of the America led western nations could well be seismic.

Obama is ushering in an era at the beginning of the 21st century that aims to offer something that is very different from what we have seen in the past 100 or more years. The 20th century was dominated by notions of size. Vast skyscrapers, huge dominating banks, corporations as powerful as political parties. Obama has become the symbol of bringing in an era that realises that in order for the world to survive socially and economically, it needs a completely new approach. What is required is to be more nimble, more stealth like, more thoughtful and considerate as opposed to just simply big and powerful.

Where on earth does this leave the c**k waving emirate? A city that boasts having the biggest and tallest of almost everything that has ever existed. All the huge malls, cloud touching skyscrapers, sprawling fun parks, vast aquariums feel distinctly last century. I’m not going to be the one to tell him, but if you look at the shifting attitudes in Europe, the US as well as other parts of the world, Sheikh Mohammed would have to completely rethink the vision of the city, if it is really going to be considered as a metropolis of the upcoming century.